


It's All Nothing Without You

by gouguruheddo



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Compliant, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Manga Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 22:07:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10228541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gouguruheddo/pseuds/gouguruheddo
Summary: It means nothing when he's not there. Spoilers up to chapter 90.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Fic that goes along with [this picture erwinsalive made](http://erwinsalive.tumblr.com/post/158286466922/the-book-has-a-maroon-jacket-and-embossed-spine). :) Kind of a collaboration, I suppose!

The dust doesn’t have time to settle in Erwin’s office before they’re moving Hange’s stuff in. It makes them both uncomfortable to pack crates worth of books and personal effects to be carted off to the capital, to libraries, to burn piles. 

There’s nine of them. It just seems hardly fitting to have a headquarters at all anymore. Who’s going to join them now? Hange’s a commander without an army, Levi a captain without his liege. The peer over at each other occasionally, death so soaked into their eyes that they barely seem to be living at all. 

Hange cracks a joke about a coin she finds in Erwin’s drawer. “Just another month’s pay in the corps.”

Levi scoffs and tosses another book into a crate. He wants to say the only payment they get is eternal. Wants to say that he’s ready to retire--that he’ll take his severance now. He runs a hand along the nape of his neck and shakes his head. “Yeah.”

Months pass without ever realizing that they’ve changed. They set up the guillotine at Wall Maria and leave on expeditions inside the wall to clear out the last straggling titans. With the new government and Historia’s influence, they had never been so well funded. Levi spends days, maybe months, training new faces. They’re Garrison soldiers, so they aren’t his. He needs to return them like a borrowed piece of equipment when he’s done with them. He doesn’t learn their names, doesn’t see the same kind of dedication to humanity as he sees in his squad. In Hange. In Erwin. They tremble in the knees, their guts more steeled against watching titans from afar instead of underneath a blade. But they do well.

Surprisingly well.

And they win.

Levi can taste the ocean. The salt in the air sticks to his face, and he licks his lips to taste it. He watches as the waves kiss their toes. He listens as they laugh for the first time in years. He smells the sweet scent of mysteries that lay below the surface. He hears white birds cackling above them, hovering in air currents without ever flapping their wings.

And it’s a dark blue, like the blue in their emblems, and so endless. The only thing on the other side is more sky, and he never really gave much thought to what freedom looked like. It might be this. He wants it to be this. But this is Armin’s freedom. He had heard him talk about it once during that night. Levi thinks about that night a lot when he’s hunched in his chair to sleep. It haunts him.

At the time, when he held the syringe, he thought of Armin and his dream. Thought that if he saved Armin they would be able to continue forward with a dream that seemed even more impossible than Erwin’s. Thought that if he saved Armin, he could save Erwin from coming back as a demon, from being something he wasn’t.

Time heals wounds or it makes them deeper. He was wrong. He watches Armin teeter against a wave, and he wishes briefly that it would suck him in and drag him away. That Erwin would wash up on shore waterlogged but alive. Beaten but breathing.

No, the ocean is nightmares.

The following month is graduation. They had a successful recruitment. With the immediate danger of titans out of the way, they saw a 300% increase in their forces. With Hange out at the capital, Levi enters their office to clean up molding dinner plates and coffee cups. There’s an order to the disorder, and he doesn’t bother trying to organize the papers that stack on the desktop. He just doesn’t have enough energy for that argument right now. He doesn’t have much energy for anything anymore.

He’s an hour in when he spots it. Pulling down his handkerchief, he rotates the book in his hand. It has a maroon jacket and embossed spine. It’s older, and he can tell when he picks it up and leafs through the pages. The musty smell reaches his nose and makes him sneeze into his arm. With a sniffle, he fans through the book, and it doesn’t take him long to realize it was one of Erwin’s.

His heart seizes, and he leaves the book open in his lap. He thinks about Erwin every day, sometimes every second, but Erwin’s never a surprise. Thinking of him is a constant, and the physical things that conjure Erwin are cataloged and sterilized. When Levi encounters them, he does so with bravery. Indifference. He has Erwin compartmentalized at this point into his psyche. The only place Erwin could affect him is in his dreams. 

But this book. This book is different. It has Levi spooked, and he isn’t sure how to move forward. He turns a page. The language is old, the information flowery and, at this point, incorrect. It must have been Erwin’s father’s, and somehow having that knowledge made the book that much more difficult to hold. Another page and he discovers it’s talking about the ocean. His breathing gets caught in his chest as he reads.

_ Oceans are bodies of water with high salt content. They can range in color depending on location, from deep sapphire to gleaming turquoise. It is predicted that the ocean covers more of the surface of the world than land. Nobody has ever been able to touch the deepest depth of an ocean. Strange creatures are thought to originate under the surface. _

Levi slaps the book shut and places it next to him. He brings his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around his legs. 

It wasn’t anything like that. The ocean was beautiful and living and moving. It was vast and mysterious and deep. It tasted different, like an exotic delicacy. And he supposed at the time that it was. They had never tasted freedom like that before--and that’s all the ocean was.

Freedom.

His chest grows tight, and there’s a sound emitting from his throat that’s foreign and hoarse. God dammit, he should have been there. He should have been at his side, their cloaks catching the wind like the sails of the ships illustrated on the book pages. He had fought the longest and hardest out of all of them. He got them all here. If it wasn’t for him…

The sob comes out long and hard, and Levi has never felt something shake through him so violently. His moaning cry echoes in the room as the tears pool and drop from his eyes. It wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t some simple pages on a piece of paper. It was so fucking beautiful and Erwin wasn’t there. He wasn’t there, and it was the ugliest thing he had ever seen in his whole life. He hated the ocean. He fucking hated it.

His hands ball into his hair as he pushes his forehead into his knees. He struggles to breathe, but he doesn’t care. His sobs turn silent as he gasps in air. Erwin wasn’t there, and he’s not here now, and he can’t fucking stand it. Tears fall salty like the waters of the ocean, and he wishes so badly to drown in them.


End file.
